Friday, May 11, 2018

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only
basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were
written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me
in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote
anymore anyhow.

Warning: it's impossible not to talk about the film's ending when talking
about its strengths and weaknesses, so the following will enter spoiler
territory.

After returning home from a business trip Giorgio Darica (Stelio Candelli)
finds his wife dead in her bedroom with a slit throat. Giorgio does not report
the murder to the police, for his business trip was of a type one just can't use
as an alibi, unless one is a big fan of spending time in prison. Instead,
Giorgio goes to a judge (or lawyer, the fansubs aren't quite sure about that
one, though I'd go with judge) he is working with. Giorgio's business, you see,
is to smuggle drugs for a conspiracy of corrupt judges, cops and politicians who
buy position and influence with the money they make from the drug trade (and
clearly, any form of corruption that's profitable). Even though that's not
something you want to say aloud in a murder trial, it is very much something a
man like Giorgio would be willing to say in a murder trial if his rather
well-positioned "friends" don't help him out of his problematic situation.

Because nobody wants to risk to have Giorgio arrested or questioned, and even
just killing him is deemed too risky, his partners hide Giorgio and his
girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti) in a big, empty hotel building, while they put
their influence in action and make further plans that may or may not be meant to
exonerate Giorgio.

The couple's stay at the hotel isn't too pleasant. Giorgio's new position in
life as a murder suspect does not make Liz happy, especially since she isn't
quite sure her lover didn't actually kill his wife, so there's a lot of
squabbling and hysterics going on between the two. That, however, is
before the hotel turns strange. Music plays in rooms where there
shouldn't be any music playing, and noises hint at other people staying where
there shouldn't be any. It's as if the hotel were haunted by ghosts peculiarly
in tune with Giorgio's troubles. Things turn even stranger when a group of
people appear who claim to be the hotel's owners. It doesn't take long until
Giorgio isn't sure what's dream, what's reality and what's delusion.

Leopoldo Savona's Death Falls Lightly is a more interesting example
of the giallo than it at first seems to be. The film's first half is more than a
bit slow going, and even though its rather sardonic comments on the state of
Italian judicial and political culture are not completely without relevance for
anyone curious about the political climate surrounding early 70s Italian genre
cinema, it's also not exactly riveting. Especially the whole "lovers flip out on
each other after spending about one day alone together" angle is just not very
convincing, and while the secrets and lies which these scenes disclose as the
basis of Giorgio's and Liz's relationship will be important later on, I could
think of less artificial ways to expose them.

However, once that (expository) hurdle is taken, Death takes a turn
for the weird I can only describe as delightful; at least if your definition of
"delightful" fits a series of scenes that turn a character's inner workings into
simply yet effectively realized metaphors and nearly drive him insane in the
process. I find especially lovely how organic the film's turn from the
semi-realistic tone of its beginning to the weird and possibly supernatural is,
Savona using the empty hotel as a place that - even when we are nominally still
in the "realist" part of the movie - does more belong to the realm of dreams
than to that of reality as we usually understand it. Savona emphasises this by
lighting and blocking everything that takes place in the hotel quite differently
from the rest of the film, suggesting the claustrophobia and spacial and
temporal disjointedness of a dream.

Of course, and somewhat disappointingly, all the supernatural occurrences
will later turn out to be no such things at all in a last act twist that is not
exactly to my taste - as I prefer the supernatural in my narratives to stay
supernatural, or at least ambiguous -, but that works too well to ruin what came
before. Mostly, this part of the movie works well enough for me because
Death - quite surprisingly for a giallo - does play fair with its
audience by featuring a killer whose motivations you can discern from the clues
the film delivers, as well as by using a device for its plot twist whose cause
you have actually witnessed and (hopefully) just forgotten as one of these
random flourishes giallos tend to include. Of course, even though the twist's
set-up makes sense seen from that perspective, it's still quite difficult to buy
it as anything any police force, even one as corrupt as the one shown in the
movie, would actually be involved in; on the other hand, it's thematically and
atmospherically so fitting to the film at hand, I can't find it in me to see
that fact as a problem for anyone who doesn't insist on absolute realism - and
therefore boredom - in her movies.

I, for one, am happy to have found another giallo that succeeds at wedding
rather sardonic politics with moments of dream-like beauty.